looking through that list it had the origin やはり without the っ. now, maybe age is catching up with me, but I could have sworn both やっはり and やっぱり were the same with the exception of the coloquialization.. or maybe once again, i learned tohokuben and not real japanese.. doh!

やっはり has reasonable absolute yahoo.co.jp hits (34,000) but is massively overwhelmed by やはり and やっぱり.

looking through that list it had the origin やはり without the っ. now, maybe age is catching up with me, but I could have sworn both やっはり and やっぱり were the same with the exception of the coloquialization.. or maybe once again, i learned tohokuben and not real japanese.. doh!

やっはり has reasonable absolute yahoo.co.jp hits (34,000) but is massively overwhelmed by やはり and やっぱり.

How does their cousin やっぱし fare?

and here I thought that was Tohokuben and decided not to use the yahhashi, yappashi approach..

I believe やっぱし is a Kanto accent (at least Tokyo and some part of Chiba close to Tokyo where I once lived). Kansai natives never use it although they perfectly understand it. Tokyoites may claim it's standard Japanese, though...

and it goes on for a page or so. the semi-premise of the book is that (like in english), certain vowels and certain consonants in certain order have a meaning (based on the sound of the word) when used as onomatopeic words... there's even a bit on a lot of them needing the と and or a する in order to make sense.

it's really an excellent book that will teach you the difference between ころころ and ころころん and きりきり. onomatopeia is one of my favorite things that i stopped studying in order to study for JLPT testing... there are a vast amount of words that can be sorta understood based on the consonants and vowels used, whether the word ends in り or ん, whether the vowels are あ or い, whether the consonants are voiced or not, whether the syllables are repeated or not, and whether there's a small つ (glottal stop) in the middle... the almost same word can take on various flavors depending on the combination of these factors, where the basic meaning is the same, but the finer points of the word depend on which consonants and vowels are used. just a little change here or there can be the difference between a high-pitched scraping noise that gets on your nerves and a low-pitched noise that reverberates while it fades away.... all determined by the voicing and vowels and っ and endings of the same basic word....

maybe after the JLPT tests are over i'll try and not-copy the excellent breakdown from the book.